


For You a House of Ivory

by cinphoria



Series: Chanson [2]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Death, Depression, Fix-It, Grief, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, I started writing this as a fix-it for 174, M/M, Queer History, RQG episode 174, Refusing resurrection, Resurrection, Self-Harm, Slightly codependent coping mechanisms, Suicidal Thoughts, but it's also a fix-it for real life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:01:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27175592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinphoria/pseuds/cinphoria
Summary: Zolf Smith, Oscar Wilde, and the nature of hope.This is an Oscar Wilde fix-it for 174. It does have a happy ending, but it takes a while to get there.
Relationships: Zolf Smith/Oscar Wilde
Series: Chanson [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1971862
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	For You a House of Ivory

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to proofread to the best of my ability, but some sections were just real rough to reread over and over, so please forgive any mistakes.

_"I long to live so that I can explore what is no less than a new world to me. Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world."_

\- Oscar Wilde, _De Profundis_

The druids had warned them, once they gauged exactly how little the crew understood of resurrection. A look had passed between the strangers that gave Zolf the distinct feeling they had low expectations of these outsiders, and that Zolf and his colleagues only affirmed whatever preconceptions there were of them. The kobolds had immediately refused the offer on Meerk and Sassraa's behalf. Hamid began to ask _why_ , his voice already pitching up, but Zolf stopped him with a hand on his arm and a gentle shake of the head and Hamid screwed up his face to keep tears from falling.

Resurrection magic will not fail, the druids told them, as long as the soul is free and willing to return.

The uneasiness in the pit of Zolf's stomach made itself known again, and he viciously pushed it back down. They set up for the ritual, and then it was just Carter and Oscar on a bed of pine needles with the druids gathered around them and Zolf nearby to heal if - _when_ \- they were revived. They were surely the first people from Meritocratic lands to witness a resurrection in a long time, but Zolf couldn't have told anyone a single thing the druids actually did. His world focused down to a single point that was Carter and Oscar's faces. He hung on to every shift of the air and hardly breathed for fear that he would miss something over the sounds of his own life. It could've been seconds or hours before he heard a crescendo of voices and saw movement. Colour had begun to return to Carter's skin, and there was movement beneath his eyelids, as if he were trying to wake from a bad dream.

Carter's body visibly readjusted just enough to account for his fatal injuries, but his bruises hardly faded. He didn't gasp, or sit upright, or any of the cliches Zolf read in novels. The clearing was dead silent except for the continuing chanting of the druids as Carter's eyes opened groggily and gradually as if from a poor night of sleep. He tried to bring his hand to his face to rub the sleep from it and cried out in pain, and Zolf, with a surge of relief and euphoria, pushed healing energy into him.

"Hey, hey Smith, whatever happened - I didn't do it," Carter slurred. Relieved laughter from the assembled crowd, a little hysterical, drifted over to them, and Barnes rushed over to help Carter off of the makeshift altar.

Zolf turned to look at Oscar, who was colourless and still as the snow.

❧ ❧ ❧

They were neither of them stupid men. Foolish, sometimes. Foolhardy, often. But not stupid. So of course they noticed.

Zolf noticed on the ocean voyage to Japan, after Wilde had gone to collect him, how Wilde's fingers lingered on coils of rope as he stood on the deck at night. How he looked into the sea. He noticed afterwards, during the interminable weeks upon weeks in Japan with no news from anyone they might've called allies, never mind friends, how when he would barge into Wilde's study he'd sometimes find Wilde sitting unmoving at his desk, staring down at the small silver letter opener.

Wilde always refocused his attention as soon as Zolf made his presence known. He smiled politely and asked how he could help Zolf, nothing like the irreverent man Zolf had known before. Zolf let him.

Zolf saw Wilde noticing too, how on that same journey he wouldn't leave his cabin for days. How he avoided looking at the sea. How when they had to fight Zolf would brazenly throw away the things that were keeping him safe for some uncharacteristically impractical gamble. How he would dig his nails just a little too hard into his palms when he was angry.

It's always the unexpected, though.

On one of the many mutually indistinguishable days they spent sheltered in Japan, when time seemed to have lost all meaning, a wave of grief and guilt suddenly hit Zolf as he was chopping vegetables. The strength of it bowled him over and shrunk his vision down to a tiny circle surrounded by black, as if he was looking through a spyglass at something distant and remote. The knife skidded out of his hand, and Zolf reflexively caught it, by the blade. He looked down numbly at it, and squeezed. He found it distantly fascinating, the way his blood welled up around the shiny metal, and drip, drip, dripped onto the grey wooden floorboards.

He heard someone call his name, but it seemed unimportant.

" _Zolf!_ "

When did Wilde get here? Zolf blinked and Wilde was standing in front of him, a mask of horror over his features. Zolf blinked again, and when had he started crying? His face was wet now. Wilde carefully pried his fingers away from the blade and so gingerly took it from him, as if he were a small startled animal Wilde was trying not to scare away. Wilde led him to the wooden bench in the kitchen and sat him down, and they sat there in silence, Wilde looking more worried than Zolf's ever seen him.

"Zolf, would you like to tell me what happened?" Wilde asked eventually.

Zolf opened his mouth to speak but found that he _couldn't_ really explain what had happened. To stall for time, he instead mumbled a few words and the cut on his palm started to close up, but it felt like the magic was dragging its feet.

"I dunno. I think I'd better get down to the cells." He started to get up.

Wilde grabbed his arm and pulled him back down. "We haven't left the inn for three weeks and the last supply delivery was over a week ago."

"Look, I just," Zolf shrugged. "I start thinkin' about people sometimes, and all the things I did wrong. I... Forget it, you wouldn't understand."

Wilde gave him such a scathing look that it almost brought Zolf out of his funk just so he could be properly offended.

"I am very tired, Mr. Smith. I've made many mistakes in my life, and sometimes this all feels a punishment, and then I hate myself for believing for even a second that I'm important enough to warrant the world going to hell just so I can be punished. I'm tired of never being able to make up for the things I've done, never being quite clever enough to balance the ledger of lies and betrayals, never being able to atone for the harm I've brought onto people I've loved, people who loved me for a time, for now it's too late. I think these thoughts, and I am devoured." He raised an eyebrow at Zolf's dumbstruck expression. "I am very tired, Zolf, and the alternative oft seems a relief. Is that what you think I wouldn't understand?"

"Shit, Wilde," Zolf intoned.

"Quite."

They sit for another stretch of silence, rain beating down on the little inn.

"How _do_ you get on, with all of," Zolf waved vaguely between them, "this."

Wilde smirked, eyes dancing almost like Zolf remembered. "Spite and the utter inability to ever do as I'm told."

Zolf laughed, sharp and surprised and real. "I s'pose that's one thing we have in common." He took a deep breath. 

"I told you how my magic works now, right? Or at least, best as I can tell. Hope and what comes next. It's just that sometimes, I can have hope, I can believe in what comes next, but I dunno if I'm going to be in it, or should."

And suddenly Wilde looked serious again, and took Zolf's hand, healed now but still sticky with blood. He turned the palm so that Zolf was looking at his own bloody hand, thick and wide and covered in calluses from a life of hardship and labour, with Wilde's own long elegant fingers smooth but for a single patch on the side of his middle finger behind it.

"Whatever sins we've committed in this life, if we don't deserve to see what comes next along with the world and all of its poorly cast players, then they can go to hell after all."

❧ ❧ ❧

The druids' chanting began to wind down and Sohra broke away from the circle and turned to Zolf with a sympathetic look on her face. She opened her mouth to speak but he couldn't bear to hear what platitudes she had to give him.

"No, no no no, no please, please don't stop," he begged her, and his voice sounded strange and small to his own ears. He was under water again and he just needed to breathe. He needed to stop thrashing and pull himself up and _breathe_. "Not yet. Please, just... Just give him, just give us a minute, just one minute, please."

She regarded him with unconcealed pity but he couldn't care less at that moment, because she nodded and rejoined her compatriots and the chanting rose again. He knelt beside Oscar, who lay on the bed of pine needles and soft white snow and looked like he belonged there. He looked like he belonged to the forest and the cold and the places that men cast aside and Zolf couldn't stand it.

Zolf picked up Oscar's hand in both of his, long elegant fingers resting over the faint scar on his palm. "I dunno if you can hear me, but I have to try. I know you're tired, Oscar. The blasted gods know you deserve to rest, and I bet they're tempting you with it. Do you remember what you said to me, that day? I don't want to do this without you, but I'm not asking you to come back for me, or for any of the rest of this world that doesn't deserve you. I'm asking you to come back for you. You deserve to see what's next too.

"Oscar Wilde," he whispered into the space between life and indifferent wind as he for a fraction of a heartbeat pressed his lips gently to Oscar's in something that more resembled a ghostly brush of skin than a kiss, "you've been my hope. Let me be yours."

Zolf startled as tears that he hadn't even realised were rolling down his cheeks splashed onto Oscar's. Was it wishful imagination, or had the man stopped looking so pallid? He wiped away the tears with a thumb, and froze as Oscar's face turned minutely into his touch. The ice that had formed on his lashes while he lay dead glinted in the sun like tiny diamonds as he struggled to open his eyes. With apparent great effort, he looked up at Zolf through still icy lashes and smiled a weak, lopsided smile. It's not the most beautiful smile Zolf's ever seen, but he wouldn't rather have anything else.

"You are."

❧ ❧ ❧

In Paris, there is a cemetery. It's the final resting place of hundreds of notable persons throughout history, and has held that honour for over a century and a half. Swarms of people visit it everyday - to pay respects, to find their roots, to gawk, just to say they've been, in pilgrimage.

Somewhere in this cemetery, there is a particular monument in the form of an androsphinx. Unlike the artistic sphinxes one might be used to seeing where they sit ancient and enigmatic, this one stands with one of its lion paws en pointe atop the tomb it guards, poised for flight. The sculpture's great wings are spread and curve forward just so. Its arms are held out in front, as if it's embracing a figure who isn't there.

The tomb is covered in a rainbow array of kisses, left by admirers over the years. Zolf sits on a bench opposite, watching as a group of young people bound over. One of the girls, hair in a trendy beehive, takes out a tube of lipstick and applies it generously, then hands it off to her friends who do the same. She places a kiss on the tomb with a loud smack and laughs as the enchantment that both protects the tomb and preserves these tributes shimmers under her lip print. A boy in a miniskirt pushes up past his friends in his excitement to go next and Zolf smiles as they squabble.

Eventually, this patch of the cemetery quiets again as the group leaves, their exuberant conversation fading into the distance. Zolf has a few minutes to his own thoughts before an older woman approaches alone, grey hair in a braid over her elegant sweeping coat. She does not hurry like the young people who came before, and when she gets there she does not leave a kiss on the monument. Instead, she walks to the plaque, plain and often unnoticed in the company of the extravagant sculpture. She holds out a hand and gently runs her fingertips over the name carved there. She bends her head close to the plaque and Zolf knows that she's speaking, but it's too quiet for him to hear. When she's finished, she walks over to the bench Zolf is sitting on and smiles at him.

"Ready to go yet, Papa?" she asks.

Zolf smiles back and shakes his head. "Sit with me for a while, Isola." She does. "And tell me, what memories did you sing to him today?"

She doesn't answer, but leans her head side by side against his. He can't see her face, yet he knows that she's smiling that secret smile as they both sit and look on towards the great monument and its unassuming epitaph.

_Oscar Wilde  
  
1854 - 1946  
  
Despair not he who's taken flight  
On Hope's untarnished wing  
In life ill-tempered with his tears   
The albatross still does sing _


End file.
